1. Technical Field
The embodiments described herein are directed to natural language communication with a computer, and more particularly to methods for generating an using databases that link language and punctuation with concepts that allow a computer to communicate using natural language and to take appropriate action in response to requests and directives.
2. Background
Yorick Wilks indicates in his review of the state of the art in Wilks Y. Is there Progress on Talking Sensibly to Machines? Science. 318: 927-927 (2007), that the problem with talking sensibly to a machine is that adequate theory for doing so does not exist. Developing a machine capable of understanding human thought and natural language has been the goal of computer science since Turing first proposed the Turing Test in the 1930's; however, although current computer programs can process text and do word search and speech to text at a high level, virtually no current programs are able to understand the meaning incorporated in text.
a. General Overview
In the embodiments described in the section entitled “Detailed Description,” a database medium for representing intellectual knowledge as managed and stored by operations of the human mind and memory is presented. This database medium can be referred to as the Fifth Medium, or M5, which is basically an alternative to language, which can be referred to as the Fourth Medium, or M4. Intellectual knowledge, also called descriptive knowledge, declarative knowledge, or propositional knowledge, is the kind of knowledge that is expressed in finite sentences or indicative statements. It requires a functioning hippocampus for its acquisition and retention in the human mind and memory.
There are five parallel media that can represent and manage declarative knowledge: Declarative knowledge in any one medium can be readily mapped onto one of the other media. The world itself is the First Medium, or M1, for the storage of knowledge about itself. Operations of the human mind, thought and memory, incorporated in the human brain, are the Second Medium, or M2, of knowledge storage. Knowledge can also be represented in other diverse ways: physical models, artworks, pictures, diagrams, blueprints, graphs, spreadsheets, databases, mathematical models, formulae, etc. This varied lot of graphic or mathematical knowledge management systems can be lumped together as the Third Media, or M3, of knowledge. Language is the Fourth Medium, or M4, of knowledge storage.
i. The First Medium—Reality
The real world is often said to be the most precise and detailed record of its present self. For the purposes of the descriptions included herein, both real and imaginary worlds can be considered as the First Medium.
ii. The Second Medium—Knowledge in The Mind
Operations of the human mind and brain are the Second Medium of declarative knowledge representation. Human thoughts model real things and states, events, and actions in the real present world around us or in some imaginary or memory world: Clear mental concepts are well understood, managed by the human mind and stored in memory as an ordered assembly readily accessible to consciousness, which is popularly termed the “mind's eye.” A block of declarative knowledge on any subject can be held and processed at very high skill levels in the human memory supported by a neural correlate of billions of interconnected neurons and selectively strengthened synapses; and readily translated into language, i.e., M4. The principles of the neural mechanisms that the brain employs for holding and operating on this kind of knowledge are not well understood.
John Locke's approach to the operations of the mind is laid out in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1692). Locke makes the point that clear mental concepts are well understood by the mind. What John Locke called ideas and defined so well in his Essay can interchangeably be called concepts herein. Locke spells out what a clear idea is and how simple ideas can be assembled by operations of the mind into complex ideas, which he calls mixed modes.
After reading Book II of the Locke's Essay one understands what simple ideas are and that they are very clear and distinct in the mind. Locke points out that ideas are perfectly clear to the person thinking them. Ideas or concepts are made of intangible mental stuff that the mind experiences. They are conscious representations of real or imaginary items, matter or events in the world around us. A concept can be thought of as what goes on in the mind when it is experienced.
Thus, Locke teaches that everyone has clear ideas in his mind, which are simple atomic ideas like sweetness, bitterness, fire, heat, the sun, etc. Here is Locke's definition of an idea:                “Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended, that there is no separation, no distance between them; yet it is plain, the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed. For, though the sight and touch often take in from the same object, at the same time, different ideas;—as a man sees at once motion and colour; the hand feels softness and warmth in the same piece of wax: yet the simple ideas thus united in the same subject, are as perfectly distinct as those that come in by different senses. The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily; or as the taste of sugar, and smell of a rose. And there is nothing can be plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of those simple ideas; which, being each in itself uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance, or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas.” Essay, II.        
This definition correlates closely with modern neuroscience research based on recording signals from individual neurons in the brain. This work has revealed the existence of neurons that have a “receptive field” in that they fire when a particular sensory pattern is presented to the sensorium. The circuits in the brain that recognize this kind of simple sensory pattern that Locke describes so well are not yet understood. One just senses that something has a “bitter” taste or that a chair is a chair or a tree a tree, as simple atomic concepts; we do not need to dissect out their component concepts. The recognition process is unconscious and it is not yet understood exactly how the brain circuits perform this process.
Locke shows how complex concepts can be consciously analyzed into their simple component concepts. He goes on to show how a single lexical word can gather several component concepts into a single complex concept. Locke gives some good examples of single lexical words standing for a compounded set of simple concepts.                “Secondly, there are others compounded of simple ideas of several kinds, put together to make one complex one;—v.g. beauty, consisting of a certain composition of colour and figure, causing delight to the beholder; theft, which being the concealed change of the possession of anything, without the consent of the proprietor, contains, as is visible, a combination of several ideas of several kinds: and these I call mixed modes.” Essay II, xii,5.        
Locke argues that clear ideas are distinct entities that can be identified, described, and assembled into formal structures that represent complex ideas. A complex mental concept is a construct of simple mental concepts akin to a molecule made up of atoms or a machine made up of parts. Locke does not expound on just how concepts are put together, i.e., the structural details with respect to how the mind builds complex concepts from atomic ones; he does not tell what specific structures form when concepts are combined, or what kind of bonds are employed between concepts.
iii. The Third Medium-Knowledge in Mathematical Models and Graphics
Just as the mind can perform thought experiments and think in pictures, many analogous media have been developed to capture, store, and transmit knowledge: pictures, paintings, photographs, videos, comics, algebraic formulae, computer simulations computer files, recordings of various kinds, blueprints, physical models, statues and mobiles, etc.; however, modern computer science is far from capable of modeling thoughts in graphic form, and a long way from creating and interpreting the declarative knowledge encoded in such media without the help of the human mind.
iv. The Fourth Medium—Knowledge Representation by Language
The Fourth medium, i.e., language, text, etc., is a one-dimensional string of just three elements: lexical words, grammatical particles and punctuation marks. Language identifies clear mental concepts involved in some domain of declarative knowledge and defines their interrelations. Humans are able to encode their ideas and mental operations into written or spoken language with extremely high fidelity. Language is able to identify individual concepts with strings of text: words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, headings, and larger corpora of text like chapters, books, and libraries. For each individual idea there is a preferred word, phrase, or sentence or paragraph that will describe that idea perfectly. Virtually any mental concept no matter how complex can be accurately captured by text: a word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph. And there are usually several alternate synonyms or paraphrases that describe the idea perhaps less perfectly. Language is able to specify the structure of complex ideas to very a subtle degree by deft use of its elements, lexical words, grammatical particles, and punctuation marks. And define precise relationships between ideas. Text authored by an expert often captures knowledge at a considerably higher level than the mind of a layperson can.
Language is by far our best source of data to study if we are to understand the operations of the mind, a much better approach than introspection. Since language is a precise choreography of thought, it is important to view language as precise instructions for building concepts and explicating precisely how the assembled concepts relate to each other. In this light it is easier to understand the essential function of natural language.
It is necessary to develop an understanding of just how language expressions instruct the construction of mental concepts, how language inserts values in particular locations in a complex concept structure, how language uses recursion to direct the construction of complex ideas from simple ones, how verbs describe and control how concepts change; finally, how language confers degrees of reality on concepts and distinguishes reality from memory and the imagination.
Perhaps the most important thing to recognize about language is how much is left unsaid. It will be a long time before it will be possible to transfer the declarative knowledge implicit in a text to a computer without human help in choosing the sense of lexical words meant in each instance, without explicitly supplying the meaning of grammaticals and punctuation marks, allusions, and metaphors, without a glossary of lexical words, without human help in imagining and adding back in all the concepts that are left unsaid in language. Perhaps the most significant need in talking sensibly to computers is managing the concept ellipsis that is forced upon language because it is such a slow communication channel.